Re: [Usability] New Paradigm of Computing for GNOME 3.0

[Ian Bentley <ian bentley gmail com>]

Hi All,

What I'm getting at is this: GNOME needs a document manager. We have
photo organisers for photos and music apps for music, but there's
nothing for 'documents' (by which I mean anything that people tend to
keep in /home/<user>/Documents). This isn't a new idea. Paperbox [1]
was a good first run at the problem, but we need something more
elaborate. I can think of a few necessary features:

 * metadata extraction and editing
 * organisation of documents by non-exclusive categories
('collections' or 'projects', perhaps?) and tags
 * integration with open and save as dialogs
 * really good search
 * browsing and exploration by metadata ('show me all the articles I
have by the author of document X')
 * versioning

 

I completely agree with this, however, I don't understand why such an document manager shouldn't be extensible (by plugins maybe) to handle not only documents, but also, music, photos, videos, et cetera.  They all have meta-data, and they should be organized as such.  Now, there is an obvious problem with this: people already use Banshee(or whatever) for audio, including organization, and searching, and managing, so this would be redundant.  Also, people want all their Music in the same place.  Should the document viewer be a full fledged music player?  No, but it should be a faster way (than a file manager) to get at all my music by 'Don Drummond' onto my screen for copying onto my usb stick/whatever.  There is another advantage here: my iPod is enormous (120 GB) I think, and I would love it to be loaded with all my music, and photos, and videos, and hell, why not my documents, but currently, syncing via banshee is ugly enough even handling music that I wouldn't even try it.  If all my media is consolidated and organized in an application, I would hope I could just "sync", and have my iPod/Generic Media Device full up.
 
This was my first post on the list, so hello!

-- 
Ian Bentley
M.Sc. Student
University of Queens
Kingston, Ontario